Page 173 - ITU Journal, ICT Discoveries, Volume 3, No. 1, June 2020 Special issue: The future of video and immersive media

ITU Journal: ICT Discoveries, Vol. 3(1), June 2020

a) that it would come within 10 years from the development of the JPEG-1 standard;
b) that it would kill the analogue photography by the early 2000s);
c) the emergence of mobile communication and with that the appearance of mobile phones (especially
smart phones) as the dominant digital photo camera type – JPEG especially did not see the emergence
of high resolution colour displays on smart phones (e.g. the iPhone) that had a completely new type of
display device for photos;
d) last but not least, JPEG also did not see that on smart phones animated still images (with 1-2 s animation
on average) would become an important enhancement for digital still pictures – on animated JPEG at
least there are now plans to have a new JPEG-1 standard extension specifying the old JPEG-1 format for
animated images.
For the aforementioned reasons, the JPEG Committee neglected in the early 1990s to develop JPEG file format
standardization suitable for digital cameras. It was in 1993 when the first drafts of the SPIFF file format (see
section 4.2) were drafted. The JPEG committee tried to harmonize the SPIFF standard with the exchangeable
image file format (EXIF), the future file format for digital cameras, but it failed: JPEG invited to its 1993 Tokyo
meeting the Chair of the EXIF standardization committee and conducted discussions on how to harmonize the
future SPIFF and EXIF standards with a common solution. In the meeting, an agreement was reached to have
a single standard; however, unfortunately, the EXIF side later dropped the agreement and went ahead with
the EXIF standard. It was too late for harmonization. The initial release of EXIF by the Japan Electronic
Industries Development Association (JEIDA) was in 1995, while SPIFF was 1996. For digital photography,
clearly EXIF was the winner, because it has been supported on the market by emerging digital cameras.
What is exactly EXIF?
Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif, according to JEIDA/JEITA/CIPA specifications) is a
standard that specifies the formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including
smartphones), scanners and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras.
The specification uses the following existing file formats with the addition of specific metadata tags: JPEG
discrete cosine transform (DCT) for compressed image files, TIFF Rev. 6.0 (RGB or YCbCr) for uncompressed
image files, and RIFF WAV for audio files (Linear PCM or ITU-T G.711 μ-Law PCM for uncompressed audio
data, and IMA-ADPCM for compressed audio data). [38]
Background:

According to Wikipedia, JEIDA produced the initial definition of EXIF. Version 2.1 of the specification is dated
12 June 1998. JEITA established EXIF version 2.2 (also known ae EXIF print), dated 20 February 2002 and
released in April 2002 Version 2.21 (with Adobe RGB support) is dated 11 July 2003, but was released in
September 2003 following the release of DCF 2.0. The latest, version 2.3, released on 26 April 2010 and revised
in May 2013 (and updated to 2.3.1 in 2016), was jointly formulated by JEITA and the Camera and Imaging
Products Association (CIPA). EXIF is supported by almost all camera manufacturers.
The metadata tags defined in the EXIF standard cover a broad spectrum:
• date and time information: digital cameras will record the current date and time and save this in the
metadata;
• camera settings: this includes static information such as the camera model and make, and information
that varies with each image, such as orientation (rotation), aperture, shutter speed, focal length,
metering mode, and ISO speed information;
• a thumbnail for previewing the picture on the camera's liquid crystal display (LCD) screen, in file
managers or in photo manipulation software;
• descriptions;
• copyright information.

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